THE CAUCASUS AS UTOPIA OF CLASSICAL RUSSIAN LITERATURE
The article deals with the basic motifs of Caucasus, the author reveals such valuable ideas of the Caucasus as space of freedom (A. S. Pushkin’s, M. Yu. Lermontov’s, L. N. Tolstoy’s “Prisoner of the Caucasus“), the place of ideal community Leo Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks”, containing utopian ideas about the social structure of the Cossacks, Lermontov's poem “The Novice” (“Mtsyri”) about the “ideal motherland”. In 1844–1853 уears in Tiflis was widely visited by Russian writers who sought to create a new branch of Russian literature – “Caucasian literature”. V. Sollogub and Ya. Polonsky actively tried to turn this utopia into reality. The Russian and Georgian Orthodox unity is the basis of the Russian writers love to the Caucasus. Idealization of the Caucasus peculiar to Russian literature of the XIX century was ended with this novel of Tolstoy. In the XX century the utopia inferior to a sober, although sometimes delighted look on Georgia and the Caucasus (B. Pasternak, B. Akhmadulina, A. Bitov).
Keywords: The Caucasus, utopia, motif, the literature of Russian Romanticism, “Prisoner of the Caucasus”
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Issue: 9, 2014
Series of issue: Issue 9
Rubric: PROBLEMS AND POETICS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE XIX-XXTH CENTURIES
Pages: 83 — 89
Downloads: 1005